Empire Magazine has revealed its list of the 50 Greatest TV Shows ever:

[As mentioned in plumtreeblossom’s thread, this is a very idiosyncratic list. Empire is a UK magazine, so maybe some of the shows we Americans loved weren’t distributed over there.]

1. Bold the shows you watch/used to watch.2. Italic the shows you've seen at least one episode of.3. Post your answers.

50. Quantum Leap49. Prison Break48. Veronica Mars47. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine46. Sex & The City45. Farscape44. Cracker43. Star Trek42. Only Food and Horses41. Band of Brothers40. Life on Mars39. Monty Python's Flying Circus (unlike plumtreeblossom, I loved it)38. Curb Your Enthusiasm37. Star Trek: The Next Generation36. Father Ted35. Alias34. Frasier33. CSI: Las Vegas32. Babylon 531. Deadwood30. Dexter29. ER28. Fawlty Towers (and loved it)27. Six Feet Under26. Red Dwarf25. Futurama24. Twin Peaks (my friends Kate and Kanthan got me into this shortly before it was cancelled; I didn’t have a TV, but I’d watch regularly at their place.)23. The Office22. The Shield21. Angel20. Blackadder19. Scrubs18. Arrested Development17. South Park (never watched it regularly on cable, ’cause I don’t have cable, but watched several seasons on DVD)16. Doctor Who (love this and would love to watch more of it)15. Heroes14. Firefly13. Battlestar Galactica12. Family Guy11. Seinfeld10. Spaced09. The X-Files (sionnagh was into it for a while. I wasn’t, so much.)08. The Wire07. Friends06. 2405. Lost04. The West Wing (recently saw a few episodes cathijosephine was watching; really enjoyed it.)03. The Sopranos (have seen bits of episodes when I was upstairs in my tenants’ apartment; wouldn’t mind seeing a whole episode)02. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (distinctly unimpressed)01. The Simpsons (have seen several seasons on DVD)

So this best 50 of all possible TV shows? Where is 60 Minutes? Where is Nova? Where is Masterpiece Theater?

and I agree. And a commenter also asks about M*A*S*H and All in the Family. My own personal list of the ten greatest TV shows (I don’t think I’ve seen enough TV to get to 50) would definitely include M*A*S*H and All in the Family, and probably also Hill Street Blues. [EDIT:Oh, and The Twilight Zone, and maybe The Mary Tyler Moore Show.]

I know this may not be evident to folks who've never seen, much less read, an issue of Empire, but it is a genre-specific magazine that covers pretty much exclusively science fiction, fantasy, horror, and action films and television programs. True, shows outside those genres show up on the 50-greatest list, but there is no way anyone who'd actually buy a copy of the issue containing said list would expect a balanced survey of television greatness across the generic spectrum. As is true of most magazines, Empire's audience is self-selecting.

Furthermore, it's worth remembering that Empire is a British magazine published mainly in the United Kingdom, and as a result, many shows that were groundbreaking in the U.S. or elsewhere, but which never caught on (or even got shown in the first place) in the U.K., are unlikely to show up. beowabbit makes this point explicitly, but it seems to be lost on some of the folks I've seen post the list in their own journals.

People have been reacting to this list with a fair measure of earnestness and even actual offense, which surprises me (I may be wrong, of course, since tone is notoriously difficult to suss out on Ye Olde Internette). I guess I just mean to say that you should no more take the Empire greatest-TV-shows list seriously than you would a Fangoria countdown of the best movies of all time -- Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yes; Citizen Kane, not so much.